Mesa Jewels

The Mesa Jewels were Mesa, Arizona's professional baseball club for part of one season, 1929, in Arizona's first league in organized baseball. Backed by the city's Junior Chamber of Commerce, the Jewels joined as an expansion club when the league grew from four teams to six.

Mesa played at Rendezvous Park, a tree-lined field with no outfield fence that later became the spring training home of the Chicago Cubs. The farming town could not draw a crowd in the summer heat, and on July 24, 1929 the club returned its franchise with roughly $2,000 in debts against $600 in assets. The league credited its remaining opponents with wins for the unplayed series, which left Mesa an official 28-61.

Infielder Ernie Lloyd, who also managed the club for a stretch, hit .410 in 34 games before the end came. Pitcher Lefty Blackburn stayed in town and became a Mesa police detective. Where the Jewels name came from is not recorded in any source we have found; the club was gone before anyone wrote it down.

Mesa did not field another professional team until 1947, when it took over the Juarez franchise in midseason and played out the year as the Orphans. In the first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV.

Arizona's first league in organized baseball opened in 1928 as a Class D circuit with four clubs, in Bisbee, Miami, Phoenix and Tucson. It became the Arizona-Texas League in 1931 and the Arizona-Mexico League in 1955, and ran, with gaps, through 1958, eventually reaching into Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and northern Mexico.